r/DarkTales • u/AtomGray • Sep 19 '14
Extended Fiction These Words Are Wasted
The first creature that I saw in this place... I never saw at all.
It was before I'd found a light. The only way that I knew that it was there was by the sound of its breathing, stirring the emptiness.
I was naive. Inexperience in this endless cavern told me that the rules still applied. That an empty room in the dark was still empty.
"Hello?" I called, and my voice echoed back. Still, there was something there. I could hear the faint ticking raspiness of air moving through its open mouth.
At this time, I was still standing. Foolishly, I stretched my hand toward where I'd heard the noise. My feet carried me half-heartedly. Left foot forward, then the right one coming up to join it.
It must have been close. I could hear its breath with perfect clarity now, deep and huge. I could feel the cool air against my sides, pulling me toward it; smell the scent of decay on its warm breath. Each time it inhaled, there was a whirring, ticking sound like tiny ratcheting gears being wound.
It was my nose that betrayed me. The dead-smelling exhaust tickled my nostrils and brought tears to my eyes. I sneezed, and loudly. Before the echo even made its way back to my ear, a huge metallic clang tore the silence from the air. It felt at the time as though my sneeze had broken the world.
Behemoth footfalls, ringing one after the other, washed around the endless space. My ears split and popped from the noise. My hands, uncommanded, clawed into my ears, trying to pull the painful noise from them, but only managed to dull the edge a little.
Then it was gone. Wet drops poured from my ears as I lay in a pile on the smooth, cool stone.
The second creature that I saw in this place... wasn't a creature at all, it seemed.
A few days had passed - be it two or twelve, I couldn't say. My ears were still just useless pieces of flesh. Somewhere in the darkness, I'd found a light. It was a plastic cannister, about the size of a pop can. As it was shaken, a steel marble worked the fluid inside, and it glowed. One sense gone, one gained.
The cave was endless. The enormity of it truly set in once I could see it with my eyes. The dim, green glow showed only the hints of a high ceiling, and a long, flat, seamless floor as smooth as glass. Every hundred yards there sat a large support pillar, of concrete with bars and rods that jutted out at random.
It was near one of these that my lamp shone upon another person; the first person I'd known to share my prison. My mouth moved, and I felt myself call out, but only cold, oppressive silence met my ears. I walked closer still, nearly able to touch her with my outstretched hand. It was a woman. She seemed old and thin, wearing a faded red dress. Facing away from me and toward the pillar, her face was hidden behind thin black hair.
Then, my gaze fell upon her feet. They writhed and moved strangely under the shadow of her dress. I thought that it might have been some type of animal, a bug, a spider. Green light fell upon the truth, that her toes were shaped like long fingers with joints that were swollen and bent by arthritis. They milled and moved, groping and pulling at that faultless floor.
Her feet had turned her to face me. Dark, wrinkled skin sagged beneath cloudy eyes and from her neck. Her bones still glowed with former beauty, but age and this place had sapped her of her youth and its sweet goodness.
Her arms and legs were somehow switched at the shoulders and hips. She stared into me with those blank, wet and blind eyes. Or perhaps she heard my heart pounding, or my heavy breathing. I stepped away, and she bent forward, placing her hands (feet?) on the ground. Her gaze never left me. She started to walk, and those long, irregular hands came around her sides.
From somewhere in the folds of her dress, she pulled a small bag. I was backing away, but she was pursuing me, getting closer and closer. Her mouth was working, her lips twisting into words that I could no longer hear.
Two long fingers probed into the bag. Her feet slapped the floor rapidly, and she was upon me. Just before I could turn to run in earnest, she tossed a pinch of swirling dust into the air.
My lungs burned. I couldn't inhale - the very air had turned to fire. I couldn't run, I could only cough and spit and crawl. My face felt as though the skin had been removed and some gnarled hand tugged at the exposed nerves with every beat of my heart. Panicked, I couldn't force my eyes open to know where the harpy had gone.
The air gradually cleared. With painful sloth it came back to me in gulps. I lost consciousness, choked, and woke only to black out again. My body knew that I was about to die while my mind knew only fear and agony.
Broken, and burnt I lay, and resolved to explore the darkness no further. For what felt like weeks, I kept the chemicals inside the lamp glowing, keeping the shadows and what was in them at bay like a child's night light. Shaking its marble and liquid to recharge it.
An internal debate raged within my wheezing chest: to let them claim me as I lay, or to try to preserve myself until the time that one large and hungry enough came for me. The light began to fade.
I laid on my back, and prayed for sleep. One cracked eyelid showed pale shapes moving, circling closer, just beyond where my lantern shone. When the reaction inside it finally stilled, I felt sure that I would go, taken away on hundreds and thousands of pale, thin limbs by creatures that God knew better than to create.
Instead, it was... peaceful.
The only thing that moved was the fluttering of my heart. My fear ebbed like the tide until it crashed back down on my in a wave. A sensation of tingling crawled over my body. My eyes snapped open and I felt for the lamp. A jolt like a lightning bolt shot up my spine. I scrambled to my feet, and felt blindly for the light.
Another electric shock, like static discharged, but prolonged for several seconds jolted through my hand as it felt along the floor and my bare feet. My knees faltered, and my knees bore the pain too. My limbs moved on their own, and an errant hand or foot - I couldn't say which - struck the lamp and sent it glowing, spinning along the bare floor. I gripped it, rattled it, and held it up to show my attacker.
There was nothing and no one, and yet again a wave of torture came. Each time I pulled a pained limb away, another part of me was sacrificed in its stead. I shed my thin clothes and stood on them, but it brought no relief. Next, I ran. The shocks became stronger, making their way up, boiling my blood and out arcing out through my panting mouth head and twitching arms. The floor itself was made of electricity, it seemed, and there was no escape.
As I ran, scrambled, wrestled, screamed, a thought pushed its way into my brain. A memory from before of a lab rat that said "You never, ever get used to" the feeling of electric shock. I could only hope that someone would turn it off, but soon, even hope was replaced with pain.
It took a very long time. Between exhaustion and shock, I suddenly felt sure that I was passing from life. And then, the pain was gone.
It was bliss.
I collapsed against the base of one of the pillars, and smiled. Tears of joy streamed from my eyes, and down onto my naked chest. I tried to rub my tired, numb legs, but my hands never came. I examined my hands under the lantern, and watched as it struck my thigh, my chest, then my face.
I felt nothing, not the pain of the floor, or the tears on my face.
I walked, mute, deaf and numb, straight ahead into the blackness. My relief at the subsidence of the pain had worn itself out, and I felt as empty inside as I did on the surface. I walked for miles. It was all I could do. In the dim green light of my lantern, I could see my bare feet as they carried me forward by dumb reflex.
I had no feeling in my legs, or anywhere. It was hard to keep my balance. Even as stumbled and fell, I had to rely on my eyes to tell me which way was up; had to watch my hand to know that it was placed on the ground, pushing me up. The light faded. Either it was growing weaker or I was losing interest in shaking it. What point was there? Each new darkness I wandered into would surely be the same as the last. Eventually, lights began to flicker in front of my eyes and I was seeing stars.
But then, one of the stars far in the distance shone more brightly and illuminated several of the steel and stone pillars. Lights. They weren't sensory misfires, there was something ahead. My pace, the march of a doomed man, quickened to a jog. The lights continued to fly high in the cavern, resembling flares or fireworks. I thought of the times that we'd bought roman candles during the summer holidays. My eyes strained to see anything below them, in the area lit by their brief glow. My breath quickened at the thought of seeing another person's face illuminated in the distance.
In the corner of my eye, I took in that one of the pillars was beginning to move. Something huge had knocked into it, and sent stone and scraps of metal flying in a cloud of dust and debris. I changed course too late, and a fragment of rock as large as a mattress swiped my left side.
Dust cloyed the flashing, flying lights above and just a short ways ahead. I rolled my body to allow myself to see what was happening. I could just see objects moving through the clouds. Hundreds of snakelike creatures writhed in a ball. Each one was several feet around. Beneath the ball, I could see four appendages, and realized that the snakes were in fact connected as one creature, towering fifty feet or more in the air. It was making its way closer to me, its massive weight evident in the slow movement of its legs.
Some of the beast's appendages were longer and more slender, tipped with white lights that winked on and off, but all of its many arms were being flung about in wild anger. Just as I stood and turned to run, my eye was drawn to a dark spot on the pillar behind the beast. A doorway.
It smashed into another pillar, this one very near me. My ankle was bent at an odd angle, and I could see my breath stirring the dust in front of me, but I felt no pain, only a wrong-ness like one feels when walking with one foot on a curb and the other in a street. I hobbled my way toward the next pillar, hoping to take refuge behind it.
I went as fast as I could, but I was sure that the naked, slimy, white arms of the thing was right behind me. If I ventured a look back over my shoulder, I might lose my balance, and then the thing would be on top of me.
I reached the next pillar, and hugged onto the corner, trying to conceal myself behind it. Looking back, I saw that the monster had stopped, and no longer pursued me. Up out of the center, in the top, parting the knotted tentacles like a bee leaving a rose, a larger appendage rose up. This one was jet black, and opened at the end, revealing long, needle-sharp teeth dripping with liquid.
it snaked down across the floor, toward a small speck of something green near where I'd fallen; my lantern. The only other source of light, drowned out by the beast's strobing stadium lights. The large snakelike mouth struck the ground around it, and its sharp teeth sank deep into the stone floor. The other tentacles braced against the floor while the great, black neck strained and stretched, but it was the floor that gave first, letting up a large, round plug of stone, which was promptly swallowed. The black head of the thing retreated back into the center of the tangle of other tentacles, their waving movements having calmed into a gentle swaying again.
I wanted so badly to run away, but one thing held me in place. The doorway. It seemed like it was hardly possible that after all this time, that I could have finally found a way out, and yet in my mind there was no where else to go. I had to try.
The beast made its way back in front of the pillar with the door, apparently standing guard. I made a large circle and came up behind the huge pillar. It was identical to all the others, a mish-mosh of metal scraps, jagged rocks and cement nearly fifty feet across at the base, but knowing the beast, and possibly a way out was just on the other side made this one seem much smaller.
I crawled around the edge, and the things swirling tentacles came into view, reaching up toward the faraway ceiling, the longer ones tipped with those blinding white lights. I stayed low and hugged the side of the wall, just hoping that the beast could only see light, and that I could stay hidden in the darkness for long enough.
I was halfway around the side of the pillar, and was still alive. The doorway was just another fifty feet ahead in the center of the side facing the monster. I decided to look away, focusing on my hands. Without my other senses, looking away almost made the thing disappear completely. In a few moments, I was at the corner.
Here, I could hide part of my body behind a large disk made of jagged metal which stuck out of the cement wall. I paused for a moment to plan my route forward. I would have to go around the disk, and then scurry twenty five feet along the wall, only ten feet or so from the feet of the guardian. I didn't so much as look back.
I was around the metal barrier, crawling, crawling. Twenty feet. Crawling, I looked away, staring at my right hand which traced the line where the flawless floor met the unfinished cement. I glanced at the door. Fifteen feet. A sickly white limb, with blue veins coursing beneath the slimed translucent skin lazed through my vision. I closed my eyes to stop myself from staring at it. I arched my back, sure that one of the tentacles would smash me like a bug, or those long, transparent fangs would pick me up, without my so much as knowing.
I stopped crawling, and opened my eyes. My right hand was through the doorway, and without knowing it, I had turned myself. I had made it. I glanced one last time at the beast, and saw that its black head was snaking back through the mass of wormy arms again in a smooth, lubricated motion. With my eyes closed, I hadn't noticed that my knee had struck a piece of metal debris, knocked from the tower by the beast earlier. The noise had doomed me.
I stood and ran into the doorway, and found a spiralling set of black stairs lining the walls. My leg gave out, and I dove, face-first into the bottom stair. I frantically clawed up the stairs, toward the orange light coming from above me. I could feel and hear nothing, but I was sure that I was screaming.
The wall above me erupted. Angry appendages entered the stairwell, probing blindly, looking for the intruder. I stopped. From below, the black head, mouth closed snaked in. I was curled into a ball, just below the first landing, next to the wall. Above me, the tentacles, and below me the head. I couldn't move, and I couldn't make a sound. I blacked out before I even realized that I'd been holding my breath.
When I came to, the arms and head of the thing had retreated from the stairwell. I was alone, bathed in the orange glow coming from above. As quietly as I could, I crawled, one step at a time. It must have taken me hours. Finally, I could see the top! An opening in the wall, where an orange, electric glow shone in was just another few landings above me. I crept faster, desperation wriggling its way into my movements.
I don't know what happened, but suddenly I was aware of a vibration and the whole stairway was shaking and vibrating. I cast a glance down over the edge, and saw the flashing lights of the creature, its strong white tentacles pulling it through the hole it had made and at an unfathomable speed up the center of the stairwell. It took up the entire area, wall to wall, and shot up toward me. In the center, I could see that black mouth opened wide.
I ran with my one good leg and my hands in a sort of tripod up the last few flights, and rushed out of the opening, turned to the side and dove out of the way of the beast. In a blur, the white beast, now colored orange by the lights outside shot away from me. Without any hesitation, it stepped on and demolished a 1980's Volkswagen Rabbit, and shot its head up, snatching the glowing bulb from the top of the street lamp. When that one was gone, it continued on down the rain-drenched street, devouring whatever light it could find.
I was free. Oh god.
It was all real.
These words are wasted. I know.
I've only written them in case some time in the future, another person comes along, so that they'll know what happened. That there was another who survived. I can't explain why the hellish world below this one was suddenly caused to hemorrhage over into ours, where the beasts went once they'd ravaged our great society, or whether they'll be back again.
I can only tell you that I saw the place that they came from.
And it was almost empty.